On a blurred wet New York day like today, after spending hours in Park Slope, Brooklyn, yesterday morning, and loosing tracks of time in the incomparable Museum of Modern Art in Midtown, Manhattan, yesterday afternoon, I dragged myself on the N subway line this morning, down to the Southern part of Brooklyn, in Sunset Park.
My goal was to check a neighbourhood I had never visited before and only read about, the Latino hood around the South Brooklyn area. I started the day on 6th Avenue, which is a Latino going on Chinese neighbourhood, before coming back to 5th Avenue and stopping at the Sunset Park Diner at the Corner of 39th Street. The avenue is actually full of Mexican delights, shops, restaurants and families. I met with a photographer friend and we left the diner to walk up to the park to discover a beautiful green and calm island overlooking the East River and Lower Manhattan. On our way back we were counting the numerous churches on the avenue and admiring the blooming Spanish-speaking meeting places, from barber shops to local fruit and vegetable stores. We then stopped at the cute Sunset Perk Cafe where we were lucky to meet two residents who fell in love with Sunset Park a couple of years back, two writers. One from the US and Austria, who recently came back from Central Europe and the other from Ireland, an adorable young Novelist, who published his first novel this year, Johnny Kelly.
If Sunset Park is an ignored-by-tourists blooming immigrant area, it charm also relies on its cleanness, dynamism and suburban quietness. There is nothing pessimist about this enclave of Mexican and Chinese communities, both equally ignoring the need to learn English to settle in the United States. Not need to underline it was one of the many subjects of conversation this afternoon... I wonder which language, Madarin or Spanish, will first overtake English in the US.
Sunset Park is definitely a good spot to watch the change.
I will have to go back.
